YouTube's video choice prompts Firefox fightback

Firefox isn't supporting the H.264 video standard because it's patented and the patent owners want fees: it's not free. But if Google and YouTube make it ubiquitous, will users have a real choice? Should they care?

YouTube has recently announced an experimental HTML5 player that uses the H.264 codec for video instead of a format based on Adobe Flash. You might think that would be applauded as a move towards open standards, but as I noted briefly last week, the new system works with Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers, but not Mozilla's Firefox. It doesn't support H.264.

This is a critical issue for Mozilla, because it risks losing market share. If users find they can play YouTube videos using Chrome or Safari but they won't play in Firefox, some users are going to switch browsers.Mozilla's problem is that H.264 is encumbered by patents: it's not a royalty-free format. And according to Robert O'Callahan in a Saturday blog post on Video, Freedom And Mozilla (with the rider that it's "nothing but my own opinion as a developer of video-related Mozilla code!"), licensing the patents "would violate principles of free software that we strongly believe in." He says:

"Users just want video to work. You Mozilla people are such idealists! Yes, that is the reason for Mozilla to exist. Anyway, in the short term, our users probably won't be affected much since Flash fallback will still work. In the long term, I think freedom will ultimately benefit users (not just Firefox users, but all users)."

The same day, Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, explained why Mozilla doesn't license the H.264 codec, and his post included the following:

"Mozilla has decided differently, in part because there is no apparent means for us to license H.264 under terms that would cover other users of our technology, such as Linux distributors, or people in affiliated projects like Wikimedia or the Participatory Culture Foundation. Even if we were to pay the $5,000,000 annual licensing cost for H.264, and we were to not care about the spectre of license fees for internet distribution of encoded content, or about content and tool creators, downstream projects would be no better off."

As Shaver points out, that kind of fee would have made the success of the web impossible. Mozilla would never have got going if it had had to pay $5m or so to use HTML, CSS, JavaScript and similar technologies.

After GIF became popular, Blizzard says "Unisys was asking some web site owners $5,000-$7,500 to able to use GIFs on their sites." He says: "We're looking at the same situation with H.264, except at a far larger scale."

MP3 was also liberally licensed in its early days (indeed, many people thought it was unlicensed), but again, there was an effort to monetise it as it became ubiquitous. Today, says Blizzard:

"If you look at the public published rates for a couple of the MP3 licensors (and there are more than just two) someone who wanted to use it would be looking at a royalty rate of about $1/downloaded unit. So if you were doing, say, two million downloads a day you would be looking at about $2,000,000 per day just to have permission from those companies to include an MP3 decoder. Could you negotiate a lower rate? Probably. But that gives you a sense of the scale if you're a small provider in a world where getting started on the web is hard and you don't have much negotiating power."

It looks as though H.264 is developing in a similar way. And the more widespread it becomes, the more power the patent-owners will have to extract money from suppliers who use it.

Free software and open source supporters will, of course, say that all this is unnecessary: YouTube should simply use the Ogg/Theora codec that offers comparable quality to H.264 (it might be worse, but not a lot worse). And as user Underhill comments on O'Callahan's post: "there is a pretty huge practical difference between 'Someone might have patents on Theora that we don't know about, and might sue' and 'MPEG-LA has patents on H.264 and *will* sue'."

Because Google dominates the web, and YouTube dominates web video, it looks as though the decision to use H.264 will mean we all end up using it whether we like it or not. That might not be the case. Blizzard says:

"I, like many others, have reason to believe that H.264 will not be Google's final choice. There's good reason to believe this: they are purchasing On2. On2 has technologies that are supposed to be better than H.264. If Google owns the rights to those technologies they are very likely to use them on their properties to promote them and are also likely to license them in a web-friendly (ie royalty-free) fashion. Google actually has a decent history of doing this."

Web video has never really been open, unencumbered and free. We've had Real Networks RM format, Apple's QuickTime, Microsoft's Windows Media Video (now standardised as VC-1), the DivX and XviD codecs, and Adobe Flash among others. There might never be one open standard, simply because some content owners will want to include DRM (Digital Rights Management) copy restrictions.

However, the web would benefit from having an open, unencumbered and free video format that enabled HTML programmers to include a video as easily as they now include a headline or a photo, wouldn't it? How do we get to that?